Small Things Amuse Small Minds
by thespeedfxrce
Summary: In the dead of winter Merope Gaunt suffocates in the heat of childbirth.


This story was written for the Third Round of the Seventh Season of the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition. I'm writing as the Seeker for The Tutshill Tornados.

My task this round is as follows

SEEKER: The Yoruba Dance from Nigeria; write about a character who celebrates small moments in life

Disclaimer: I don't own any part of the world J.K. Rowling has created. It's all hers, from Diagon Alley to Hogwarts to all the people living there.

Thanks to my team for betaing!

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**Small Things Amuse Small Minds**

**Word Count: 1501**

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He didn't love her.

As she lay sprawled out and weeping on the steps of Wool's Orphanage in Muggle London, belly swollen with child and heart heavy in anguish, she still couldn't comprehend it. This fact simply couldn't manifest itself in her mind. It was inconceivable, and thus she felt the familiar burn of betrayal weighing down deep in her chest.

It was almost funny, the way her mind worked when it came to him. The way it tricked her into feeling ways that could only be considered delusional, neurotic and obsessive.

Though she truly believed otherwise, the fact remained that he had never betrayed her. He could only have been capable of such a treacherous act if he'd had any loyalty to her to begin with. Handsome in facial structure, wealthy in the bank, high-standing in society, and callous to his core, Tom Riddle owed Merope Gaunt nothing and thought of her just as such. She was nothing to him, but he was the world to her.

His sharp, aristocratic features had never paid her a glance until she'd bewitched him. Not with her looks as she was pale and plain and nothing worth looking at. Where his eyes were a striking blue she could drown in, hers were a set of slanted brown eyes that never quite looked at the exact same direction. The Amortentia she'd slipped past his unwilling lips late one night had produced an illegitimate heir conceived from a volatile cocktail of artificial lust and desperate, obsessive love.

She never wondered if she really could call it such. Love. It never once occurred to her just what that meant. She would insist it had a presence in their relationship. She would push it upon the unfeeling father of her child as if she could convince him he felt it in return as long as she proved she loved him. The child in her womb proved his love for her and in turn, emphasised her devotion to him. She had enough love for the both of them if only he would take it.

But he didn't love her. Nor did he hate her, and that only made it worse.

For Merope Gaunt, he felt nothing but a distaste similar to what one would feel for a rat scurrying across the street into the filthy sewer. She was below him in all aspects of her existence, not worth the trouble of acknowledging for more than a fleeting moment of disgust before moving on to things that _mattered_.

That, more than anything, burned and twisted the shattered remains of her heart. She could have dealt with hate, at least then he would have acknowledged her existence. However, this utter indifference he felt towards her would have shattered the strongest of woman, and she was well aware, after years of her father and brother telling her, that she was far from strong.

She'd been viciously excommunicated from the Wizarding community for her willingness to sully herself before marriage and lay underneath a muddy Muggle. She'd been disowned from a strong, ancient line directly related to the great wizard Salazar Slytherin. The treatment she received at the hands of her family and community made her numb, but the rejection of the man for whom she'd risked it all utterly ruined her.

And so she lay on the cold, cracked concrete of the only place that would take her. The only doors that would open in the dead of night for a poor beggar woman ripe with child. Her contractions came in with a vengeance every few minutes as the orphanage workers surrounded her, but seemingly ages passed for Merope.

Her stringy, pallid hair stuck to her sweat soaked scalp as she was carried inside and placed onto a thin mattress covering hard, coiled springs.

Everything around her was coming at her too fast, too hard. She could no longer comprehend what exactly was happening to her and she grew delirious and confused.

"Tom?" she wailed in a voice she didn't recognize. "The father," she explained. "Where is my Tom?" _My Husband_, she wanted to say. But it was a title he'd never granted her the use of. Not even the sickly sweet allure of Amortentia had driven him to ask her to wed him. If she allowed herself to think about it for too long, that fact drove her even deeper into despair. She had hoped that once she proved her love and released him from the love potion, he would fall into her arms.

She couldn't have been more wrong.

They were speaking over each other, but someone tried to say something to her. They told her he wasn't there. He wasn't coming. She came alone, was there someone else they could send for?

"That's impossible. He _loves_ me!" She had to find him. He needed to meet his son. "Where is he? Please." She grabbed the arm of a passing orphanage worker, her unkempt fingernails digging into the woman's skin. "_Please_, you must find him."

The room was too hot. There were too many people inside the small space, pushing her hair away from her face, replacing blood-soaked towels with fresh white ones, and running around shouting orders in words she could no longer concentrate on enough to understand.

Her body tore open and the white flash of pain coupled with the devastation that came with Tom Riddle's absence threatened to overwhelm her. Hands that held her knees apart forced her to continue pushing. The crushing devastation ripped through her and she screamed and screamed. Searing pain for hours on end was all Merope knew. That and the suffocating heat of the room was all she was able to comprehend. There was no end in sight and her strength was waning.

The child she'd born broke her.

"Would you like to hold him?"

Merope blinked in her delirium. The handmaiden placed the child in her hands before she could answer.

Smaller than she could have ever imagined possible, the bundle in her arms looked at her with the same piercing blue eyes and head of black hair she had fallen in love with. As she gazed exhausted and spent at her son she knew with everything that she was that he would look just like his father.

"Tom," she murmured, barely able to find the strength to utter the word.

"Is that his name?" someone asked, too close to her face, breath too hot on her skin.

No, she wanted to shake her head. That was his father's name. The child should be called "Marvolo," she said. Like her father. Like all Purebloods of her line inheriting the name of their grandfather.

"Tom Marvolo?" another voice asked, just as uncomfortably close.

Again she wanted to shake her head. Her love was Tom "Riddle," she whispered. Her son was to be nothing like the callous man in reality and everything like the Tom Riddle she had invented in her Mind's Eye and loved fruitlessly.

"Tom Marvolo Riddle," the first voice said definitively and so it was. Merope was no longer concerned with such things. Her mind fell into a tunnel vision and she couldn't be bothered with the incorrect naming of her son.

The room was too hot. Sweat dripped down her forehead and her breathing was coming in short and shallow gasps. There was no matter more pressing than the heat of the room.

Her mouth moved to form the words but her voice was cracked and hoarse from overuse. Around her, people moved, but no one paid her any mind. They took her baby from her arms and the suffocating heat seemed to grow exponentially. "It is too hot," she garbled when a woman in white finally understood Merope was trying to communicate with them. The words caught in her throat and the nurse furrowed her brow trying to understand them. "Please, I cannot breath."

The nurse's eyes widened and she rushed to the window, calling for the others to vacate the room immediately. The breeze of cool air overtook the room and Merope wept with joy. Tears swam in her eyes and she found the seemingly small act of opening a window to be the most glorious act of salvation she had experienced since she had fallen from grace.

The winter air was a blessing and her babe, wiped clean of her blood, was placed back into her arms. Tom Marvolo Riddle cried because although the cold was rescuing for Merope, to him it was only an inconvenient assault on his comfort.

Merope wrapped her child in her arms and held him close to her breast. She looked at the bright stars peppering the clear night sky and smiled as the chiming of the bells signaled the arrival of a new year. Maybe, she thought, this small moment of peace and happiness would set the pace for her life in this coming new year.

Her heavy eyelids fluttered closed and one last smile ghosted on her lips.


End file.
